1. High and Dry
In this photo essay, Bidisha Sinha from the Watershed Organisation Trust, one of ASSAR's partners
in India, describes a survey that has been conducted in the Ahmednagar
district of Maharashtra to assess the impact of climate change on
people's wellbeing and happiness.

2. "It has been twenty days already that I spent
in the field. The winter here is as harsh as
the summer. The sun, unobstructed, throws
down its ire with no mercy. And even though
the mornings come with the thin mist and
sunsets are unusually peaceful, the
afternoons scorch the last bit of moisture out
of this land ...
"… I have even started differentiating the
shades of ochre and brown in this
immensely dry landscape."
Field Diary, 23rd December 2016,
Javle Baleswar, Sangamner, Maharashtra

3. The survey work for our wellbeing study in Maharashtra had begun amidst one of the most radical economic reforms in
modern India. It wasn’t easy. With constant worry looming over us about cash constraints for our own day-to-day
movements, we were also worried about whether the same inconvenience would affect the answers to questions about
wellbeing and happiness.

4. The study began in early August with basic
conceptualisation. What followed were literature
reviews, reviews of existing questionnaires and
numerous visits to the field before the final
questionnaire was framed out.
Around mid-November, the survey was rolled
out. It started off with a formal training session for
the six surveyors who could correspond freely
with the local people in Marathi. The surveyors
were encouraged to pick up the nuances
of people’s expressions while they were talking
about their life in general.

5. “It isn’t one of the regular surveys,” the surveyors
admitted over dinner the night before we were
about to start off. “Never had we worked on a
project where we had to pick up nuances and not
simply gather quantitative data.”
In the early winter chill under the starlit sky of the
countryside, we chatted about their expectations
of the impending survey, their lives back home
and a plethora of other subjects that were new to
me, and that started giving me perspective of the
variety of people the same state bore with
respect to natural resources.
While some easily understood the challenges of
water scarcity, others were from water-rich
regions and admitted that water scarcity was a
topic that they read about in newspapers only.
Some also noted that the dialect of Marathi
spoken here is different from that back home.
Women have to walk long distances for water.

6. On the first day of our survey, we visited Sutarwadi, a non-descript village in the Parner block of Ahmednagar district of
Maharashtra. As we moved away from the Kalyan-Nagar highway, the green fields of maize seemed to become sparse.
The lands on both sides of the road became more and more stony with much less soil cover – the sheer emptiness hurt
our eyes. Combined with thorny bushes, spinous short trees and dried-out grass, the landscape singularly spoke of one
colour: brown. I had visited Sutarwadi before, during late monsoon, when things were a bit greener. Now it bore no
resemblance at all.

7. “Rains have been marginally better this year. The last
three to four years were terrifying. With drought hitting our
lands, and wells turning dry, we often have to queue in
front of tankers to get our drinking water. Even the crops
we grow do not get enough nutrition to grow full-length
sometimes,” observed one old woman during the surveys.
In drier areas, crops often do not grow healthily.

8. The survey form was divided into two
sections: the first contained the baseline
information, typically provided by the
household head, while the second section
was answered by three other members of
the household – covering a male and
female adult and a male and female young
adult.
The format of the questionnaire thus
opened up an opportunity where we could
speak freely with sections of a family (like
young females), with whom we generally
don’t get to interact. This was particularly
interesting as even in the course of few
days, we got to see how great a difference
lies between the perceptions of the young
generation and the old.

9. In the Parner block, one finds the traditional cattle herders, locally called the dhangar samaj. Each herd is generally
maintained by an extended family that moves from place to place after the monsoon with their 50-100-strong herds of
sheep and goats. Traditionally farmers pay the herders to graze their sheep and goats for a day or two in their fields. The
animal droppings serve as a rich fertiliser for the soil before the new crops are sown. The men of the tribes wear very bright
turbans and are of mild disposition. It gave me an innate pleasure to sometimes sit and share meals with them in the
temporary tents they put up near the grazing lands.

10. As we moved on from one village to another, some a bit greener and more fertile than others, the issues that plague rural
Maharashtra appeared more complex. Each village elicited some new pictures or reiterated the trends of others. While
Hivre Korda is flourishing from the household businesses of creating and selling handwoven trinkets for bullocks to farmers
all over Maharashtra, villages like Sutarwadi suffer from the chronic problem of migration to cities for jobs. Sutarwadi boasts
of engineers, lawyers and doctors from almost all houses and yet the village is emptying out due to a lack of local
resources.

11. “We consider education as
a way out from our misery,”
mused a septuagenarian.
“But what will happen to
your villages?” I asked.
“Given the trend, they will
empty out sooner or later.”

12. Farmers often stay near their farming lands, away from the main villages. These places are perched in the foothills of
plateaus and are miles away from the next settlement. These settlements often have no electricity, and wild animals like
leopards or foxes prey on goats, sheep and hens, making survival tough. In Javle Baleswar, we came across such a hut
where a man sat weaving baskets out of dried lantana stems.

13. A man making baskets from lantana stems.

14. Not every village is dry. Villages like Kauthe Khord are situated in the banks of Mula river, one of the major rivers draining
the Sangamner block. The village receives water throughout the year, taking almost three crops a year which include
pomegranates, onions, sugarcane and Bengal gram. However, Shedgaon, which is fed by canals, invests heavily in large
livestock. Most villages in the Sangamner block have dairy cooperatives which collect milk from the villagers. The villagers
admit that while farming gives money only at the end of a harvest, the income from milk is a steady flow and their main
source of income for day-to-day expenses.
Bengal gram

15. Cotton

16. The search for the elixir of wellbeing and happiness has plagued human kind through the ages. The question has spanned
both philosophical and scientific spheres. Each discipline has applied its own paradigms to the concept – exploring different
angles of the same Delphic topic. Philosophical discourses attribute freedom, social acceptance, health, capability and
aspirations to the general wellbeing of a person or a community while science strives to improve the means to achieving
this. However, the complex mesh of a person’s needs and wants often varies from one household to another, between
genders, and within other reference groups such as age, caste and asset-holdings. It is indeed tough to come up with a
definitive or uniform measure of wellbeing and it is exactly this that has occupied my mind during my field days.

17. The problems of poverty, varying climatic
conditions, migration trends, varied uses of
natural resources, social boundaries, traditional
systems and market failures are all creating a
picture that is so complex that it would require
days of careful deliberation to draw useful
conclusions or come to some kind of
understanding of the human conditions in the
face of climatic change, which could be taken
further into effective public planning
programmes.

18. ABOUT ASSAR
ASSAR uses insights from multiple-scale, interdisciplinary work to improve the understanding of the barriers, enablers and limits to effective, sustained and widespread climate
change adaptation out to the 2030s. Working in seven countries in Africa and South Asia, ASSAR’s regional teams research socio-ecological dynamics relating to livelihood
transitions, and the access, use and management of land and water. One of four consortia under the Collaborative Adaptation Research Initiative in Africa and Asia (CARIAA), ASSAR
generates new knowledge of climate change hotspots to influence policy and practice and to change the way researchers and practitioners interact.
This work was carried out under the Collaborative Adaptation Research Initiative in Africa and Asia (CARIAA), with financial support from the UK
Government’s Department for International Development (DfID) and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada. The views
expressed in this work are those of the creators and do not necessarily represent those of DfID and IDRC or its Board of Governors.
Creative Commons License
This brief is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Articles appearing in this
publication may be freely quoted and reproduced provided that i) the source is acknowledged, ii) the material is not used for commercial purposes
and iii) any adaptations of the material are distributed under the same license.© 2017 International Development Research Centre
Photos: Bidisha Sinha © Photographer Editing and layout: Birgit Ottermann
For more information: ASSAR - www.assar.uct.ac.za or email Bidisha Sinha - bidisha.sinha@wotr.org.in
Photographs and text by Bidisha Sinha